[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O HYPER BATTLE VIDEO - "SINGING, DANCING, BIG TRAINING!!”



This was an exquisite disappointment.

I mean, the gold standard for HBVs (at least for the shows I've watched) are Faiz and Build. Faiz is legendarily bonkers, rendering the themes of the show in a musical fever dream. Build is absurdism hiding a beating heart, taking a random piece of tie-in media to talk about toxic male role models and media's tendency to favor paternal narratives over maternal ones. Those two massively exceeded what I expected, in ways that maybe colored my expectations for this one.

Like, I really thought this one would try and do something fascinating, and it did, but not at all in the way I was hoping for. I thought we'd get some intriguingly brief look at emotional well-being, or the ability to draw strength out of tragedy. Instead, we got a workout video?

It's seriously just a ten-minute workout video featuring the characters of Den-O. There's a fight scene at the end, where Ryotaro puts his exercise lessons into practice, but there's just about zero story here. Ryotaro wants to get stronger, tons of working out, Ryotaro defeats three returning Imagin. There isn't really an arc so much as there's cause and effect. Narratively, it's nowhere, and there's nothing happening in it to talk about.

But conceptually, I find it absolutely fascinating. In a lot of ways, Den-O is a series about self-care. It's incredibly internal, focusing a lot of the storytelling on how we live with ourselves (not to give away the Series Recap post for next week), and that topic is filtered through Ryotaro and the Imagin. So taking the HBV and turning the emotional self-care into physical self-care, making the lessons about physical fitness instead of mental fitness, I think that's a really cool idea. It's not, y'know, a compelling story (I will not be taking Ryotaro's advice and watching this video again, probably ever), but it's a completely worthwhile idea that's largely supported by the series' themes.

So, yeah, not really much here to talk about (I ate pizza and watched Wrestlemania with a roommate tonight; I am not doing calisthenics), but a pretty neat concept that I applaud the creators for attempting.



THE BAGGAGE CAR

-Deneb shows up but Yuuto doesn't, which communicates to me that the show absolutely knows which part of the Deneb/Yuuto team is paying the bills.

-Sieg's appearance... was it just because of the movie? It's so totally random to have a two-episode character pop back up for a scene that I've got to assume the producers thought it'd help if they had a movie character show up. I don't know. It's a great surprise, but it's insane that Sieg's first post-movie appearance was in the HBV. (Unless I'm forgetting him showing up again in the show? I assume he'll be somewhere in the next few episodes.)